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The Mourner’s Bestiary
A critically acclaimed literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.
Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of 200 years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.
A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.
The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.
Author Eiren Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of 200 years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy.
A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.
The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2024
65 people are currently reading
1829 people want to read
About the author
Eiren Caffall
4 books182 followersEiren Caffall is a writer and musician based in Chicago. Her writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV. Fire forthcoming in 2024 from The Center for Humans and Nature. She received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary is forthcoming from Row House Publishing in 2024 and her novel All the Water in the World is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in early 2025.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
December 21, 2024
Ended my year of nonfiction with this, and couldn’t have picked a better title. The writing is stunning- incredibly lucid and lyrical, and then throws a haymaker in the middle of a paragraph. I can’t remember reading a blended memoir that weaves stories together without the use of big, sweeping transitions or section breaks- and as someone working on writing my own- wtf… how??? So much to learn from this as a writer, as a lover of nature, as a disabled person, as a reader. I loved it.
May 27, 2025
This was such a sad book.
Caffall's bio blurb says she's a musician. I'm unfamiliar with her works. I have no idea who she is outside of the context of this book. If it had not been for self-description, I might've thought she was a marine ecologist. There was a lot of minutiae in each chapter for each of the sea life she based her life around. Some of it was interesting to me (I've always felt a kinship for whales - majestic, matrilineal, fierce, powerful, beautiful, smart), and some of it made me want to fast forward. I learned, sure, but I learned about stuff I didn't care about. I would've preferred a straightforward memoir or a book dedicated to marine life. The intermingling didn't work for me.
I often find memoirs challenging to invest in when I don't know the writer. Such was the case here. I have little interest in getting to know more of her life. Her life has been so hard, and I doubt I would have the inner strength to endure all that she did with her parents, her body, and her romantic partners. And I feel like it's really callous of me to say in light of all her hardship. I wish her better health for her and her child, and I wish her an easier life than she's had, but I also kind of wish I hadn't really spent the time on this book. It was well written enough, and parts of it was reminiscent of Diane Ackerman, but it missed the mark for me. Sorry!
Caffall's bio blurb says she's a musician. I'm unfamiliar with her works. I have no idea who she is outside of the context of this book. If it had not been for self-description, I might've thought she was a marine ecologist. There was a lot of minutiae in each chapter for each of the sea life she based her life around. Some of it was interesting to me (I've always felt a kinship for whales - majestic, matrilineal, fierce, powerful, beautiful, smart), and some of it made me want to fast forward. I learned, sure, but I learned about stuff I didn't care about. I would've preferred a straightforward memoir or a book dedicated to marine life. The intermingling didn't work for me.
I often find memoirs challenging to invest in when I don't know the writer. Such was the case here. I have little interest in getting to know more of her life. Her life has been so hard, and I doubt I would have the inner strength to endure all that she did with her parents, her body, and her romantic partners. And I feel like it's really callous of me to say in light of all her hardship. I wish her better health for her and her child, and I wish her an easier life than she's had, but I also kind of wish I hadn't really spent the time on this book. It was well written enough, and parts of it was reminiscent of Diane Ackerman, but it missed the mark for me. Sorry!
September 4, 2024
For PKD Awareness Day (the author and I both have polycystic kidney disease), my early Shelf Awareness review: Eiren Caffall’s debut is an ardent elegy for her illness-haunted family and for the ailing marine environments that inspire her.
For centuries, the author’s family has been subject to “the Caffall Curse.” Polycystic kidney disease, a degenerative genetic condition, causes fluid-filled cysts to proliferate in a person’s enlarged kidneys. PKD can involve pain, fatigue, high blood pressure, kidney failure, and a heightened risk of brain aneurysm. Given Caffall’s paternal family history, she expected to die before age 50.
Caffall’s melancholy memoir spotlights moments that opened her eyes to medical and environmental catastrophe. In 1980, when she was nine years old, she and her parents vacationed at a rental cottage on Long Island Sound. They nicknamed the pollution-ridden site “Dogshit Beach”—her mother spent idyllic summers there as a child, yet now “both the ecosystem and my father were slipping away.” For the first time, Caffall became aware of her father’s suffering and lack of energy. She realized that she, too, might have inherited PKD and could face similar struggles as an adult.
In 2014, Caffall, then a single mother, took her nine-year-old son, Dex, on vacation to the Gulf of Maine. During the trip, she had a fall that prompted a seizure, and she and Dex were evacuated from Monhegan Island by Coast Guard ship. Although no further seizures ensued and no clear cause emerged, the crisis served as a wake-up call, reminding her of how serious PKD is and that it might afflict her son as well.
The book draws fascinating connections between personal experiences and ecological threats. Caffall structures her story as a gallery of endangered marine animals such as the Longfin Inshore Squid and Humpback Whale, tracing their history and exposing the dangers they face in degraded environments. Red tides (massive algal blooms) and floods are apt metaphors for physical trials: “the Sound was dying, hypoxic … from an overwhelm of nutrients flooding an ecosystem—nitrogen, phosphorus, imbalanced saline—the same things that overwhelm a body when kidneys can no longer filter blood properly.”
Re-created scenes enliven accounts of family illness and therapeutic developments. The lyrical hybrid narrative, informed by scientific journals and government publications, is as impassioned about restoring the environment as it is about ensuring equality of access to health care. Personal and species extinction are just cause for “permanent mourning,” Caffall writes, but adapting to change keeps hope alive.
(Out on October 15. Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)
For centuries, the author’s family has been subject to “the Caffall Curse.” Polycystic kidney disease, a degenerative genetic condition, causes fluid-filled cysts to proliferate in a person’s enlarged kidneys. PKD can involve pain, fatigue, high blood pressure, kidney failure, and a heightened risk of brain aneurysm. Given Caffall’s paternal family history, she expected to die before age 50.
Caffall’s melancholy memoir spotlights moments that opened her eyes to medical and environmental catastrophe. In 1980, when she was nine years old, she and her parents vacationed at a rental cottage on Long Island Sound. They nicknamed the pollution-ridden site “Dogshit Beach”—her mother spent idyllic summers there as a child, yet now “both the ecosystem and my father were slipping away.” For the first time, Caffall became aware of her father’s suffering and lack of energy. She realized that she, too, might have inherited PKD and could face similar struggles as an adult.
In 2014, Caffall, then a single mother, took her nine-year-old son, Dex, on vacation to the Gulf of Maine. During the trip, she had a fall that prompted a seizure, and she and Dex were evacuated from Monhegan Island by Coast Guard ship. Although no further seizures ensued and no clear cause emerged, the crisis served as a wake-up call, reminding her of how serious PKD is and that it might afflict her son as well.
The book draws fascinating connections between personal experiences and ecological threats. Caffall structures her story as a gallery of endangered marine animals such as the Longfin Inshore Squid and Humpback Whale, tracing their history and exposing the dangers they face in degraded environments. Red tides (massive algal blooms) and floods are apt metaphors for physical trials: “the Sound was dying, hypoxic … from an overwhelm of nutrients flooding an ecosystem—nitrogen, phosphorus, imbalanced saline—the same things that overwhelm a body when kidneys can no longer filter blood properly.”
Re-created scenes enliven accounts of family illness and therapeutic developments. The lyrical hybrid narrative, informed by scientific journals and government publications, is as impassioned about restoring the environment as it is about ensuring equality of access to health care. Personal and species extinction are just cause for “permanent mourning,” Caffall writes, but adapting to change keeps hope alive.
(Out on October 15. Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)
January 16, 2025
Without a doubt one of the best books I've read in a very long time. The writing is stunning, the science is fascinating and the way the author weaves her life into the natural world is just incredible. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
December 2, 2024
This is in no way an unbiased review of Eiren Caffall’s 2024 memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary. I’ve known Eiren since we were teenagers together growing up in Amherst, MA. We were part of a tight gaggle of friends who made theatre together, supported each other through joyously fun and devastatingly hard times, and helped each other grow through those transformative days the ways that only best friends in high school can. I’ve been eager to read this book since Eiren announced it on Facebook last year, and came into it heavily predisposed to love it based on my long-term friendship with her.
That said, this book--its concept, the writing, the connections she makes--is genius, and even if I had never met Eiren, I would have been mesmerized by it. It’s the story of Eiren’s family’s hereditary history of polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and how that impacts all of them and their relationships with one another, all the while interwoven with details, information, and examples of our current global climate crisis. If reading that sentence leaves you skeptical that there are substantive, interesting, and numerous connections between these seemingly disparate topics, don’t worry: I felt the exact same way when I first read the premise of the book.
I’ve never been happier to be so thoroughly proven wrong. Throughout the book, Eiren unpacks remarkable connections between her body and its disease with the natural world. She flows back and forth effortlessly: health becomes a metaphor for the environment becomes a metaphor for health becomes a metaphor for the environment until they are inextricably linked. Eiren uses her deep fascination with the natural world to produce deep, heartfelt, brilliant ruminations on collapse, death, rebirth, the timelessness of nature vs the quick passing of a human life, and a philosophical need to understand, appreciate, and celebrate all of it. Eiren’s writing is exceptionally and deeply well-researched across multiple fields: science, history, medicine, and politics, to name a few. It’s not hyperbole to call it genius: she makes deep connections time and time again—scientific and literary—which take an extraordinary intellect to create.
Eiren brings that same brilliance, passion, and dedication not just to her ideas but to her writing. It’s painstakingly well-written. Every word feels like a choice. The book begs the reader to slow down and pay attention to the prose, but manages to do so without getting bogged down or leaden. Her writing matches the topic, flowing back and forth in time, sometimes across paragraphs and within chapters, evoking nature and the sea, waves and tides moving back and forth, demanding your focus. Eiren’s word choices include some absolutely brilliant observations, like her fascinating dissection of the term “over-enriched” (p. 23).
While health--hers, her family members’, the Earth’s--are the driving force of the book, Eiren also takes deep dives into the complexities of relationships, of parenting, of the necessary reconfiguring of relationships with parents as we age. We see her both as child and mother: disappointed with her parents, struggling as a single mom, feeling empathy and bitterness at the same time and trying to hold all of those feelings at once. This is Eiren’s story, but Dex, her son, is the driving force, in many ways. He’s precocious, sensitive, and deeply curious about nature. It’s the two of them on an island (sometimes literally, as in the central scene of the book), trapped there with her hovering worries about PKD: past, present, and future.
I went into this book thinking that I knew Eiren, so I would know a lot of this book. Instead, I realized that I was reading about an Eiren that I knew but was not familiar with. Or maybe the opposite: that I was familiar with, but did not know? Because of our pre-existing relationship I brought a ton of assumed knowledge and preconceived notions to my reading, many of which turned out to be wrong. After all: we were deep friends for maybe five years, and I was too incurious at age 14 to learn about her past, and know little of what has happened since we graduated 35 years ago. Even as I spotted references that I share in my own life (the death of one of our tight gang in 1987; a production of The Tempest) and absolutely claim a paragraph on p. 93 as an unnamed shout-out, throughout the book I felt acutely aware of how little I knew of her then and certainly now. I have a vague recollection from the 80s that I knew something about her dad was sick and maybe her mom drank too much but … hey, let’s go to rehearsal! Our connection faded in spurts over the intervening decades--visiting her in Chicago and hearing about a life-changing visit to the Badlands, a high school reunion where she was shuddering in the immediate aftermath of her divorce, sporadic Facebook updates and messages--and I truly knew her less and less, even as she remained a core figure of my high school memories. So, yes, this book was phenomenal and I would highly recommend it, even if I didn’t know Eiren already. But while you are reading it, perhaps hold a thought for someone in your own life who you remember fondly from the past, and hold a spot of empathy, caring, and understanding the hidden challenges that can overwhelm so many people, even those we think we know.
That said, this book--its concept, the writing, the connections she makes--is genius, and even if I had never met Eiren, I would have been mesmerized by it. It’s the story of Eiren’s family’s hereditary history of polycystic kidney disease (PKD) and how that impacts all of them and their relationships with one another, all the while interwoven with details, information, and examples of our current global climate crisis. If reading that sentence leaves you skeptical that there are substantive, interesting, and numerous connections between these seemingly disparate topics, don’t worry: I felt the exact same way when I first read the premise of the book.
I’ve never been happier to be so thoroughly proven wrong. Throughout the book, Eiren unpacks remarkable connections between her body and its disease with the natural world. She flows back and forth effortlessly: health becomes a metaphor for the environment becomes a metaphor for health becomes a metaphor for the environment until they are inextricably linked. Eiren uses her deep fascination with the natural world to produce deep, heartfelt, brilliant ruminations on collapse, death, rebirth, the timelessness of nature vs the quick passing of a human life, and a philosophical need to understand, appreciate, and celebrate all of it. Eiren’s writing is exceptionally and deeply well-researched across multiple fields: science, history, medicine, and politics, to name a few. It’s not hyperbole to call it genius: she makes deep connections time and time again—scientific and literary—which take an extraordinary intellect to create.
Eiren brings that same brilliance, passion, and dedication not just to her ideas but to her writing. It’s painstakingly well-written. Every word feels like a choice. The book begs the reader to slow down and pay attention to the prose, but manages to do so without getting bogged down or leaden. Her writing matches the topic, flowing back and forth in time, sometimes across paragraphs and within chapters, evoking nature and the sea, waves and tides moving back and forth, demanding your focus. Eiren’s word choices include some absolutely brilliant observations, like her fascinating dissection of the term “over-enriched” (p. 23).
While health--hers, her family members’, the Earth’s--are the driving force of the book, Eiren also takes deep dives into the complexities of relationships, of parenting, of the necessary reconfiguring of relationships with parents as we age. We see her both as child and mother: disappointed with her parents, struggling as a single mom, feeling empathy and bitterness at the same time and trying to hold all of those feelings at once. This is Eiren’s story, but Dex, her son, is the driving force, in many ways. He’s precocious, sensitive, and deeply curious about nature. It’s the two of them on an island (sometimes literally, as in the central scene of the book), trapped there with her hovering worries about PKD: past, present, and future.
I went into this book thinking that I knew Eiren, so I would know a lot of this book. Instead, I realized that I was reading about an Eiren that I knew but was not familiar with. Or maybe the opposite: that I was familiar with, but did not know? Because of our pre-existing relationship I brought a ton of assumed knowledge and preconceived notions to my reading, many of which turned out to be wrong. After all: we were deep friends for maybe five years, and I was too incurious at age 14 to learn about her past, and know little of what has happened since we graduated 35 years ago. Even as I spotted references that I share in my own life (the death of one of our tight gang in 1987; a production of The Tempest) and absolutely claim a paragraph on p. 93 as an unnamed shout-out, throughout the book I felt acutely aware of how little I knew of her then and certainly now. I have a vague recollection from the 80s that I knew something about her dad was sick and maybe her mom drank too much but … hey, let’s go to rehearsal! Our connection faded in spurts over the intervening decades--visiting her in Chicago and hearing about a life-changing visit to the Badlands, a high school reunion where she was shuddering in the immediate aftermath of her divorce, sporadic Facebook updates and messages--and I truly knew her less and less, even as she remained a core figure of my high school memories. So, yes, this book was phenomenal and I would highly recommend it, even if I didn’t know Eiren already. But while you are reading it, perhaps hold a thought for someone in your own life who you remember fondly from the past, and hold a spot of empathy, caring, and understanding the hidden challenges that can overwhelm so many people, even those we think we know.
December 22, 2024
Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. So powerful and moving, so wise and filled with such beautiful prose. Cafall takes memoir to another level with this book, creating a parallel narrative between her struggles with PKD, a devastating kidney disease that has been in her family for generations and has killed so many of her kin, and the devastating effects of climate change on oceans and sea creatures. If this sounds like an impossible task, that’s because in the hands of a less masterful writer it would be. This book floored me with its compassion, its empathy, its passion and perspicacity—but since Cafall clearly knows her science as well, it’s like a primer on the lives of these creatures and how short-sightedness and a refusal to see the interconnectedness of all living beings is bringing us closer to collapse. And yet Cafall refuses to give up hope, for both herself and the planet. A tour de force.
January 1, 2025
Fascinating blend of history, science, and memoir. I almost quit a chapter in - was initially turned off by some of Caffall’s perspectives on chronic illness and reproduction, but I also think it’s important to read things you don’t necessarily agree with, so I stuck with it and am glad I did. For a book centered around environmental upheaval and disruptive health conditions, this was ultimately a hopeful and life-affirming read
June 9, 2025
I’ve read a few biographies like this, where the author has an affliction which they come to understand while facing problems in the world around them and come to terms with it in a relatively poetic way. This is one of the best, most interesting, well-researched efforts in this area. It’s poignant and tragic, and there were places where I was saying out loud “what were you thinking?!” And then the author explains why and while it wasn’t a choice I would have made, it makes perfect sense. I’m glad she chose to live her life fully. This review isn’t doing it justice, this book fully lives up to the hype.
Want to read
November 7, 2024haven’t read yet but when I saw someone talk about this on bookstagram I was like wow sounds really good, want to read. Turns out the collapsing marine ecosystems that are the subjects of this book?? The gulf of Maine and THE LONG ISLAND SOUND
brb kms-ing
brb kms-ing
March 28, 2025
"The water isn't that deep, the water isn't that cold, the water will heal your body."
Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular!!!!!
Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular!!!!!
dnf
February 22, 2025Listened to the audiobook.
DNF @ 3%
Beautiful title!
DNF @ 3%
Beautiful title!
March 23, 2025
Half environmental collapse facts/half memoir of someone with a genetic kidney disease who is surrounded by depressing characters with endless highfalutin prose that makes you want to toss the book across the room.
January 21, 2025
I thought this was stunning. I have nothing to compare it to but In the Dreamhouse but they have nothing in common besides being such unique and beautiful approaches to memoir.
February 18, 2025
4.5 stars
Emotional, hopeful, and just lovely.
Emotional, hopeful, and just lovely.
March 26, 2025
i liked this book a lot more than i thought i would! the combination of scientific research and marine biology with memoir and narrative was very well done and woven together seamlessly. i’m not usually one for narrative non-fiction but this was definitely a good read!
June 20, 2025
brb - updating my Mastermind specialist subject to the marine ecosystems of the Gulf of Maine.
Read
July 9, 2025i never leave reviews but rating memoirs doesn’t really sit right with me and i neeeeeeed to express how gorgeous the prose in this is
December 20, 2025
4.5
A beautifully written creative nonfiction memoir.
A beautifully written creative nonfiction memoir.
December 26, 2024
Compelling, inspirational, profound.
April 7, 2025
[4 stars]
Objectively, this is an incredible book. Caffall is doing things with language that I can only dream of doing. The connections she makes between marine creatures, her family, environmental collapse, and her disease are beautiful and extremely well done. She moves between scenes and topics with very little transition in an almost abrupt way, but without creating too much confusion. She is an exemplary writer when it comes to these aspects. There is a heavy use of reconstructed dialogue throughout the book. Whole conversations are recounted and written as dialogue. This is not something that I enjoy in memoirs, but it’s not inherently a bad thing.
I think this was just a case of “not for me”, unfortunately. Though very technically impressive and well executed, I found the lack of transitions between scenes and topics to cause the book to drone on and on. I would think that I must be further into the book than I was, then look and see that I was only four hours into it. This is probably more so a personal thing, as I see many other reviews praising this style of writing/formatting (and, again, I think that she was very skillful with how she wrote it, but somehow at the same time it lost me). This feeling of the book droning on made me really bored at different points. I never really thought about DNF-ing the book, but I constantly was wishing that something would happen that would finally latch onto me and suck me in. That moment never happened. Of course, I didn’t go into this expecting a thriller or drama-filled story. I knew it was a sad, slow memoir, but still I wish there was the one thing that interested me more (I don’t mean to say that the author’s life is boring, by the way, but just as a project the book would not click with me).
A beautiful book that I wish I liked more. My enjoyment while reading this book was probably closer to three stars, but I cannot justify giving this book any lower than a 4 star due to the skill of the writing itself. Definitely a book I will reread at a future point in my life, but it just didn’t work for me enough right now.
Objectively, this is an incredible book. Caffall is doing things with language that I can only dream of doing. The connections she makes between marine creatures, her family, environmental collapse, and her disease are beautiful and extremely well done. She moves between scenes and topics with very little transition in an almost abrupt way, but without creating too much confusion. She is an exemplary writer when it comes to these aspects. There is a heavy use of reconstructed dialogue throughout the book. Whole conversations are recounted and written as dialogue. This is not something that I enjoy in memoirs, but it’s not inherently a bad thing.
I think this was just a case of “not for me”, unfortunately. Though very technically impressive and well executed, I found the lack of transitions between scenes and topics to cause the book to drone on and on. I would think that I must be further into the book than I was, then look and see that I was only four hours into it. This is probably more so a personal thing, as I see many other reviews praising this style of writing/formatting (and, again, I think that she was very skillful with how she wrote it, but somehow at the same time it lost me). This feeling of the book droning on made me really bored at different points. I never really thought about DNF-ing the book, but I constantly was wishing that something would happen that would finally latch onto me and suck me in. That moment never happened. Of course, I didn’t go into this expecting a thriller or drama-filled story. I knew it was a sad, slow memoir, but still I wish there was the one thing that interested me more (I don’t mean to say that the author’s life is boring, by the way, but just as a project the book would not click with me).
A beautiful book that I wish I liked more. My enjoyment while reading this book was probably closer to three stars, but I cannot justify giving this book any lower than a 4 star due to the skill of the writing itself. Definitely a book I will reread at a future point in my life, but it just didn’t work for me enough right now.
November 20, 2025
3.5 stars
January 22, 2025
Eiren Caffall’s hybrid memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, is a tour de force for the genre. I discovered her work when listening to a recent episode of Ronit Plank’s podcast about all things memoir. Caffall had my attention almost immediately when she mentioned “polycystic kidney disease”, commonly called PKD, a condition she has faced since her youth. A rare genetic disease that is highly inheritable, her family tree is riddled with those who have been killed by this perplexing disease. My step-father died in 1980 of polycystic kidney disease after surviving nine years on kidney dialysis, at that time a relatively new technology for treating kidney failure. This was a crushing, never-to-be-forgotten experience of my late adolescence, and while I have met people on kidney dialysis, I have never known another person with polycystic kidney disease. Moreover, I had never read a book that centered its story in this disease. I felt an immediate kinship with Caffall and her topics, and knew I would have to read this book.
Caffall has produced a braided, hybrid text. The braiding takes place among the inter-related themes—of the human disease she and her family struggle with and a global disease, meaning climate collapse and the death of marine environments, with which we all struggle. Her focus on the marine environment is primarily, but not exclusively, on the waterways of Long Island Sound and the Gulf of Maine, two connected water bodies within the Atlantic marine world.
Each chapter draws upon an experience she has had with one of the marine creatures of these special waters. By so doing she has created a bestiary that represents the personal marine world through which she views her kidney disease (in which watery cysts fill her kidneys) and the world’s environmental collapse (where water ways are dying), inviting the reader to consider their own bestiary and the tales it might tell each of us about climate and environmental concerns.
One of the first things I noticed about the book and Caffall’s relationship to this disease was her use of the acronym, PKD, forcing the realization that in my family we had never used the acronym. We only used the full formal name, polycystic kidney disease, and even then we said it as little as possible, much like the world of Harry Potter and the injunction not to speak the name of the evil one—Voldemort. This finding made me aware of the crushing denial my family members carried in regard to this sickness.
Caffall’s background as a science writer is strongly in evidence as she speaks of the marine environment, the beasts of the bestiary, and the challenges both have faced over the decades of her life, as well as before. Moreover, she provides chapter notes with bibliographic references and an astute index to which interested readers can refer. I liked these features so much that I am willing to suggest all memoirs adopt them.
The last chapter of the book is a glorious, uplifting, and thought-provoking finale in which Caffall creates a final round of reconciliations and contradictions among the book’s important themes. This is also where the term “mourning” in her title comes into focus, as she contrasts the personal notion of grief, with the communal reference to mourning.
As a memoirist-in-training, I found Caffall’s book to be an exemplar par excellence for the purposes of my work. Caffall has taken the field of memoir into new and exciting territory. Don’t miss this one.
Caffall has produced a braided, hybrid text. The braiding takes place among the inter-related themes—of the human disease she and her family struggle with and a global disease, meaning climate collapse and the death of marine environments, with which we all struggle. Her focus on the marine environment is primarily, but not exclusively, on the waterways of Long Island Sound and the Gulf of Maine, two connected water bodies within the Atlantic marine world.
Each chapter draws upon an experience she has had with one of the marine creatures of these special waters. By so doing she has created a bestiary that represents the personal marine world through which she views her kidney disease (in which watery cysts fill her kidneys) and the world’s environmental collapse (where water ways are dying), inviting the reader to consider their own bestiary and the tales it might tell each of us about climate and environmental concerns.
One of the first things I noticed about the book and Caffall’s relationship to this disease was her use of the acronym, PKD, forcing the realization that in my family we had never used the acronym. We only used the full formal name, polycystic kidney disease, and even then we said it as little as possible, much like the world of Harry Potter and the injunction not to speak the name of the evil one—Voldemort. This finding made me aware of the crushing denial my family members carried in regard to this sickness.
Caffall’s background as a science writer is strongly in evidence as she speaks of the marine environment, the beasts of the bestiary, and the challenges both have faced over the decades of her life, as well as before. Moreover, she provides chapter notes with bibliographic references and an astute index to which interested readers can refer. I liked these features so much that I am willing to suggest all memoirs adopt them.
The last chapter of the book is a glorious, uplifting, and thought-provoking finale in which Caffall creates a final round of reconciliations and contradictions among the book’s important themes. This is also where the term “mourning” in her title comes into focus, as she contrasts the personal notion of grief, with the communal reference to mourning.
As a memoirist-in-training, I found Caffall’s book to be an exemplar par excellence for the purposes of my work. Caffall has taken the field of memoir into new and exciting territory. Don’t miss this one.
March 18, 2025
"But it wasn’t a failure. Life itself, his and mine, were worth saving, worth having, no matter what."
The most beautiful memoir I have ever read. This book drowns you.
Eieren Caffall has cultivated a tone of such loving sorrow. An "ocean elegy" filled with some of the most powerful lines in any piece of writing I have ever come across. It's genius. It's educational with its facts about ecology and sea creature descriptions. It's powerful with such honest, open, and emotional beats strewn throughout. Caffall shows the reader what it's like to live in the face of constant tragedy and come out of it seeing such profound beauty in the world. I wept with her. I wept for her. There is an ache that thrums deep within the bones of the writing, and it is mesmerizing.
The scenes and locations in this piece are so vivid. The tension between different 'characters' palpable. The settings alive and thriving with such amazing sea life. Living so close to so many of the key settings made it that much more real. I learned so much about marine life. I learned so much about being alive. I learned just as much about myself.
I don't want to lean too far into the cliché of "this piece changed my life and has significantly altered how I see the world, and will live from here on out" but it did. It truly did. I will think of the lessons that the Caffalls taught me every time I see the ocean.
If you only ever read one memoir this year, let it be this one. Sit by the sea and think of the crabs in the sand. What an honor it was to read this story. What a privilege to be alive to do so.
The most beautiful memoir I have ever read. This book drowns you.
Eieren Caffall has cultivated a tone of such loving sorrow. An "ocean elegy" filled with some of the most powerful lines in any piece of writing I have ever come across. It's genius. It's educational with its facts about ecology and sea creature descriptions. It's powerful with such honest, open, and emotional beats strewn throughout. Caffall shows the reader what it's like to live in the face of constant tragedy and come out of it seeing such profound beauty in the world. I wept with her. I wept for her. There is an ache that thrums deep within the bones of the writing, and it is mesmerizing.
The scenes and locations in this piece are so vivid. The tension between different 'characters' palpable. The settings alive and thriving with such amazing sea life. Living so close to so many of the key settings made it that much more real. I learned so much about marine life. I learned so much about being alive. I learned just as much about myself.
I don't want to lean too far into the cliché of "this piece changed my life and has significantly altered how I see the world, and will live from here on out" but it did. It truly did. I will think of the lessons that the Caffalls taught me every time I see the ocean.
If you only ever read one memoir this year, let it be this one. Sit by the sea and think of the crabs in the sand. What an honor it was to read this story. What a privilege to be alive to do so.
August 20, 2025
The author (Eiren Caffall) has an inherited genetic illness that is in mutation and it is called PKD "polycystic kidney disease". In her family the survival rate is usually 50 years, but others have died younger from this incurable disease.
This novel does move slowly because the author does give you a lot of detail about the forms of PKD, it causes fluid-filled cysts to multiply in the kidneys until they grow and swell, overwhelming, all healthy tissue - It's almost like the kidneys drowned. It can be very painful or it can be very quiet. Most people don't survive it.
I found it fascinating how the author intermingled this disease with how species of marine life have been dying out in her hometown of the Gulf of Maine and then as well in the Long Island Sound. She tells stories of marine life in two collapsing Marine ecosystems and this plays in relation to the illness of PKD.
Eiren also gives a lot of insight into her love of her young son Dex (and her not knowing if she had passed this genetic disease onto him), it also follows the hard relationship that she had with her mother and with her first husband. it was just really interesting to me to read of the different Marine species that were affected in these two ecosystems, from very microscopic creatures to humpback whales.
I enjoyed this memoir very much.
This novel does move slowly because the author does give you a lot of detail about the forms of PKD, it causes fluid-filled cysts to multiply in the kidneys until they grow and swell, overwhelming, all healthy tissue - It's almost like the kidneys drowned. It can be very painful or it can be very quiet. Most people don't survive it.
I found it fascinating how the author intermingled this disease with how species of marine life have been dying out in her hometown of the Gulf of Maine and then as well in the Long Island Sound. She tells stories of marine life in two collapsing Marine ecosystems and this plays in relation to the illness of PKD.
Eiren also gives a lot of insight into her love of her young son Dex (and her not knowing if she had passed this genetic disease onto him), it also follows the hard relationship that she had with her mother and with her first husband. it was just really interesting to me to read of the different Marine species that were affected in these two ecosystems, from very microscopic creatures to humpback whales.
I enjoyed this memoir very much.
December 31, 2025
Mourner’s Bestiary is a work of non-fiction that blends natural history, memoir, and grief writing in a way that feels deeply considered and quietly profound.
What I appreciated most is how the book creates space for reflection rather than instruction. Caffall uses animals, extinction, and observation as a way of thinking through loss, but she resists turning them into neat metaphors or moral lessons. Grief here is ongoing, imperfect, and intertwined with daily life rather than isolated as a singular event.
While Caffall offers no answers she is free with her thoughts and experiences and her writing gave me pause to consider and deepen my understanding of my relationship with my own chronic illness and disability. The attention Caffall pays to vulnerability, dependency, and adaptation felt especially resonant, offering a way to think about the body and its constraints without sentimentality or false resolution.
The book also prompted reflection on imperfect relationships and love. It acknowledges that care is often partial, uneven, and flawed, and that loving well doesn’t always mean loving cleanly or completely. That honesty is where much of the book’s power lies.
Mourner’s Bestiary is quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent. It doesn’t rush toward meaning or closure, and it trusts the reader to sit with complexity. An incredible book to end the year on.
What I appreciated most is how the book creates space for reflection rather than instruction. Caffall uses animals, extinction, and observation as a way of thinking through loss, but she resists turning them into neat metaphors or moral lessons. Grief here is ongoing, imperfect, and intertwined with daily life rather than isolated as a singular event.
While Caffall offers no answers she is free with her thoughts and experiences and her writing gave me pause to consider and deepen my understanding of my relationship with my own chronic illness and disability. The attention Caffall pays to vulnerability, dependency, and adaptation felt especially resonant, offering a way to think about the body and its constraints without sentimentality or false resolution.
The book also prompted reflection on imperfect relationships and love. It acknowledges that care is often partial, uneven, and flawed, and that loving well doesn’t always mean loving cleanly or completely. That honesty is where much of the book’s power lies.
Mourner’s Bestiary is quiet, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent. It doesn’t rush toward meaning or closure, and it trusts the reader to sit with complexity. An incredible book to end the year on.
April 25, 2025
Lately, I find myself enjoying memoirs exploring themes of illness (psychic and/or physical), especially if said books use nature as a means of understanding the experience of being sick/healing. The Mourner's Bestiary fell into this specific genre, so I began this book with much hope. Unfortunately, The Mourner's Bestiary tries to be too many things. On the one hand, the book is a memoir of the author's experience living with Polycystic kidney disease. This alone would have been such a rich, compelling read. But in trying to connect the author's chronic illness to the steady decay of the ocean, this book also becomes science non-fiction, with paragraphs-long passages that feel way too academic and jarring compared to some of the more intimate scenes of the author's memories. I can tell a lot of research went into the book, but the factoids about PKD/marine life felt out of place and not well-integrated with the memoir sections. The reading experience overall felt disjointed and unsatisfying. Wish the author could have distilled the scope of the book into a few focal moments/themes.
January 13, 2025
The Mourner’s Bestiary by Eiren Caffall is a fascinating blend of memoir and marine environmental science. Eiren writes about living with polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a genetic disease that has plagued her family for generations. Between her explorations of chronic illness and loss, Eiren details the history of marine ecosystems. She lyrically weaves ecological information with personal experiences. This is an educational and touching journey. It is a celebration of life in the face of grief. It finds meaning and hope inside a body that is failing. This is beautifully done, with a genuine passion for marine life running throughout. Eiren faces her illness with a bravery that is to be admired. I find her story inspiring and I appreciate her sharing it with us. The connections she makes between two seemingly unrelated subjects is done brilliantly. A powerful book with an odd concept that comes together in a profound way. Highly recommend. 4/5 stars.
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March 4, 2025
Beautiful and powerful writing, but I fear this was not quite 5 stars for me the way it was for other readers... maybe I will try it again another time. I loved so much of this book - the way Caffall describes her own experience with PKD and generational illness, her relationships with her parents, her connection to various bodies of water, her love for her son, her evolving perspectives on how she moves through life and the world as a chronically ill person. What I did not love as much was the exploration of warming waters and the creatures within them - as someone with only limited knowledge of marine life and limited knowledge of the geography/fishing economies of the East Coast (and limited interest in these areas), I felt like I was being pulled out of the story and magic of the writing whenever Caffall switched mid-page over to marine topics. This became extra hard to follow given how much Caffall's personal story jumped around on the timeline. I think I lost a lot of the thread because of the constant switching.
May 5, 2025
When I read any book, I like to go into it with the knowledge that not every story is for me. Stories, and especially memoirs, are deeply personal things that may not resonate with everyone. I think this is especially true when speaking about disability. Even people with the same condition experience it differently. All this in mind, I was hesitant to start Mourner’s Bestiary.
Once I started I could not stop. I started reading on a bad pain day during a flare up of my own chronic illness. It left me reflecting on how my own relationships have been influenced by a disability that runs on one side of my family. My experiences are not one to one with the author’s, but they’re just close enough that her story affected me deeply.
What got to me, what caused me to sob with a feeling of being *seen*, was the thesis of the memoir. You must keep going. You must hold joy and terror, braided together in the same hand. We should not have to suffer, but we will, so be there with your community to mitigate harm. We deserve better, so we must hold on and give ourselves time to make better.
Once I started I could not stop. I started reading on a bad pain day during a flare up of my own chronic illness. It left me reflecting on how my own relationships have been influenced by a disability that runs on one side of my family. My experiences are not one to one with the author’s, but they’re just close enough that her story affected me deeply.
What got to me, what caused me to sob with a feeling of being *seen*, was the thesis of the memoir. You must keep going. You must hold joy and terror, braided together in the same hand. We should not have to suffer, but we will, so be there with your community to mitigate harm. We deserve better, so we must hold on and give ourselves time to make better.
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